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RE: Karl Marx: "I am not a Marxist!"
It sounds to me like you aren't very familiar with Marx, nor with the conditions of the working class majority during the Industrial Revolution.
It sounds to me like you aren't very familiar with Marx, nor with the conditions of the working class majority during the Industrial Revolution.
Honestly I wasn't looking at the psychology of Marx at the time of his writings. Though, if you look at the mid to late 1800's in Europe one can see the cause of the idea of communism. There seems to be a balance of totalitarianism. One side is the Monarchy and the other side is communism, when people live under the boot of a royal long enough they want that royal to live under their boot. Interesting idea and it was worth testing, unfortunately it was tested and ended in over a hundred million people dead. Having kings was an interesting idea too, ended in countless millions dead. Marx in my mind was the reaction to totalitarian monarchy style government. All actions have an equal and opposite reaction.
Again, seems like you don't understand Marx. Personally, I am not a Marxist myself, but I do find some of his ideas interesting (others of them are frustrating and irritating).
The reality is that Marx wasn't really as much of an authoritarian as we tend to think today. If you look at his work on the civil war in France, he really has a lot in common with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of modern anarchism. Marx and Engels basically advocated communalism and delegative democracy with recallable delegates. Very similar to Murray Bookchin's model. Basically, they thought that capitalist exploitation in the factories would impoverish the workers until they could not even survive without rebelling. So the workers would rebel and take over the government, more or less democratically. The idea of an authoritarian vanguard party was a Leninist idea that Marx would have despised. Also, Marx thought the State was the tool of the dominant class and existed for exploitative purposes. He recognized it could also be used as a tool by the workers, but he thought the proletariat State should be temporary. Basically, the workers would take over the State to keep from creating a power vacuum with the revolution, then use the apparatus of the State to implement socialist reforms. Ultimately, the democratized State and egalitarian social order would lead to a withering away of the State. Thus, we'd end up with something much more like communist anarchism. Marx was no totalitarian. Leninism, which dominated Marxist circles after Marx, was a very totalitarian ideology though.
Marx was fundamentally opposed to the domination of man by man, whether in the workplace or in society in general. Leninism was a distortion of Marxism.
Interesting conclusion, I can somewhat agree that the abstract writings of Marx did not produce in practice a direct reflection of the writings. The original flaw though, which I think we both agree about, is the intervention of the state in either case.
For example if workers want a union, great setup a union, but you don't need permission from the state to bid for wages. In fact you do not want the state to help, because then they get a cut and can take away this "right" whenever they want. The state is not the best instrument to deliver rights, the state is far better at taking away rights, which I think causes the issue of totalitarianism. Great conversation, really appreciate the discuss.